AI startup Paige launched a new AI product this week. The New York City-based company unveiled an AI-powered biomarker module that the company says can evaluate more than 505 genes and identify 1,228 molecular biomarkers from standard pathology slides.
The new product, called OmniScreen, analyzes digital images of cancer tissue slides that are stained using hematoxylin and eosin (H&E).
“These slides contain important visual patterns linked to genetic changes in cancer cells. By training our AI on three million of these images, it learns to recognize patterns and in turn detects genetic mutations or biomarkers that are often used to guide cancer treatment decisions,” explained Razik Yousfi, Paige’s CEO and chief technology officer.
In oncology, gene mutations are important in determining what type of cancer a patient has and what treatments will be most effective, he noted.
When people hear “breast cancer,” most think it is just one disease, he said. But the reality is that it can be one of many different types, all of which require unique approaches to treatment, Yousfi pointed out.
“Omniscreen could be valuable in detecting these subtypes across many different types of cancer. Whereas other methods, such as gene sequencing, are expensive and time consuming, Omniscreen can be done quickly and more cost effectively directly from the tissue sample using AI,” he declared.
While Omniscreen is currently only available for research, it allows researchers to better characterize disease and develop improved therapies for patients, Yousfi added.
In his view, Omniscreen is cheaper and faster than other methods for detecting gene mutations and alterations. Rather than completely replacing these other methods, Yousfi believes there is an opportunity to decrease the costs associated with gene analysis for precision medicine.
“By screening patients quickly using Omniscreen, we could identify quickly which patients are negative for certain mutations and use these to select patients for more complex, expensive testing. In research, Omniscreen gives cancer researchers a convenient, fast and cheaper approach to studying cancer and building better and more effective markers to improve cancer care,” he remarked.
This applies to cancer research conducted at hospitals, universities and pharmaceutical facilities for the development of new cancer drugs, Yousfi noted.
Picture: Yuichiro Chino, Getty Images
